Increasingly, the consumer market is demanding portable electronic devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDA), MP3 players, portable storage systems, advanced wireless telephones, cameras, and other handheld devices. Traditional non-volatile storage mediums, such as hard drives, floppy drives and other storage devices, are generally unsuitable for portable devices. These typical devices generally have moving parts and as such are subject to mechanical failure. In addition, these devices are bulky and consume a large amount of energy. As a result, developers are turning to solid-state non-volatile memory devices, such as electrically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM) and flash memory, for use in portable products.
Typically, each time a user turns on one of these portable electronic devices, the memory therein is tested in order to locate and repair bits that may have failed. As the size of the memory increases, the time required to test the memory also increases. As such, an improved system and method for testing solid-state storage is desirable.